@uwemueller: "A recently held conference on medieval church buildings in Brandenburg had
some nice infos on church building and planning. With the dating of
individual churches resting mainly on art historic comparisons, and the
models employed for dating resting mainly on those art historic ideas of the
develoment of thoses churches, a new idea about connections between building
styles and and spatial distribution was presented that might be of interest
to others.
The new model compared building styles and groundplans of village churches
with soil qualities and the size of land (Feldmark) of the village. It
showed a significant connection between bigger and more complicated churches
and their location on above average soils in villages with lots of arable
land. As an example, the most commonly agreed upon feature for late
romanesque churche, the apsis, could be shown to belong to the same group as
the 'ideal' early gothic building, a rectangular church with smaller choir
an a broad tower in the west.
While the given explanation for the phenomenon was purely economic (villages
with much land on good soils were richer, being able to afford more
sophisticated building styles, poor villages had to do with a small
unadorned rectangular building topped by a wooden tower), there may be some
chronologic factor involved as well, as the first settlers arriving would
settle on the best soils and would have been provided with more arable land
than those arriving centuries later.
I found it a fascinating idea, even though the paper I presented, centering
on a different region, aimed to show that there was a sudden horizon of
destruction of late romanesque church buildings before the early gothic
churches were build on top of the ruins. Even though the dating is poor at
best, this can be seen to parallel a violent change of political control of
the area in the 1240s. And while the paper mentioned above took the
above-the-ground part of the building to be all there ever was, I could show
evidence for usually at least one earlier building in stone and one in wood.
We were quite fascinated from each others work.
Can anybody tell me if similar work has been done on English churches and
the Doomeday records concerning the wealth of the villages? Are there
excavations in churches providing evidence for rebuilding, fundamental
changes in style, destructions ?
What about Scandinavian churches?
As royal authority was established early on a local basis there, strife for
posession and the accompanying destructions should be a a local phenomenon
there, in contrast to the regional occurrence her (if I'm corret that is).
have fun
Uwe Mueller"
    @drache: "Fascinating! I'll bet the conference was, too 8-)
Mary Loomer (aka Erilar)
Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine t�tige Unwissenheit.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
            (There's nothing worse than ignorance in action.)
Erilar's Cave Annex: <url>"
{'source': 'USENET', 'other_information': '{"reply_count": 1, "forum_name": "sci.archaeology.20140613.mbox"}', 'file': 'data/output/usenet-sci.archaeology.parquet'}